MADE IN USA: Someone left a Maoist in the Rain

"We were in a political movie, which means Walt Disney with blood."

It's exciting times for Godard lovers as two of his 1966 films: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and Made in the USA make their way to the few remaining stores next week. Set in "Year Zero" at some Alphaville-esque locale called "Atlantic City," (apparently Suburban France), Made in USA is a great little road marker connecting the dots of Godard's earlier and later pop cinematic narrative deconstructions like Pierrot Le Fou (1965) and First Name: Carmen (1983), the stuff before and after his anti-western dada/agitprop phase. It's adrift in primary colors, post-modern signage, surrealist wordplay, collage, satire, intellectual critique of the right/left dichotomy, a eulogy for countercultural idealism almost before it starts (May '68 was still a couple years off), and a last waltz for his crumbling marriage to the leading lady, the heavenly Anna Karina (she looks weary, as if she's been screaming at him between takes).

If you've ever basked in the primary pop glow of Pierrot Le Fou and wished Godard had made a whole slew of movies in widescreen color with Karina, guns and anti-American sloganeering, then Made in USA is your film. It delivers the goods while showing you just how much less good such goods are a second time. Made just one year after Fou, it seems as if it's the end of a twenty year run of sequels. Karina's femme fatale is still beautiful but less fresh, less gaminesque. There's no trickster male of Jean Paul Belmondo's manly charisma to balance her star wattage and sex appeal; Jean Pierre-Leaud tries hard to be manic, and maybe that's the problem.( The only time his performance hasn't sunk under the weight of forced childlike spontaneity was as an actual kid in 400 Blows). In this noirscape of bright primary colors, our antiheroine Paula Nelson (Karina) is all alone,  trying to find the one guy she liked from earlier films, a raving commie intellectual believed dead, named Richard P, by navigating a series of players. Though he's hard to find, we get to hear him ranting away in the form of shrill tape recordings (of Godard reading Maoist obtuse ideology with the terseness of Milenay and pomp of Renfraux). 

Paula is a possible spy for either side of the left/right divide but her true motives for wanting to find Richard P. remain unclear; we assume he's an on-again/off-again boyfriend and/or symbol for Godard's own lost idealism, a Maoist Rosebud. But did that reporter ever find the sled? No. As she hunts this invisible, presumed murdered Communist ex-boyfriend through Raoul Coutard's impressionistic landscape (at one point Karina name checks Monet while standing in the foreground of a backyard full of beautiful trees out of focus behind her -- was Impressionism a symptom of weak eyesight?) we get the notion that this is just one of those films that masters make when they're off their A game thanks to an unconscious aggression towards the studio or their star, like Marnie or Lady from Shanghai.

I don't mean to disrespect it, because many a master's B game is still fascinating and worship-worthy, maybe even more so than their A game (I like Made in USA much more than the dreary industrial landscaping of 2 or 3 Things, which most highbrow critics consider superior and I'm sure they're right), as long as they include deconstructions of B-movies and B-games into the films themselves, as in riding right along with audience expectations and observations, tweaking or thwarting them at every turn (without turning them off) and yet delivering what is promised in such a way that our own desire for it is called into question. Ideally, this anti-art leaves us at least with a pretty face to gaze at when nothing else happens. Hopefully the aggression hasn't led the auteur to sabotage even that, by making their starlets cut their hair short, or driving them so crazy with retakes they look hungover and embittered. Then, we got a problem. And isn't that why you think you did it? Even though any dime store Freud knows better? Godard at least gets around this qualm by filling the screen with other pretty faces, which an insecure diva who still had sway with her director might insist be replaced by plainer ones. 

B-movie conventions are alive and deconstructed, either way. The evolution of noir convention from The Big Sleep to Easy Rider, the death of a counterculture yet unborn, and the kind of in-the-moment spontaneity that makes his work seem like you're thinking it up as it goes along.  The exact second you realize that the hot blond waif sitting at a table in the background of the bar looks a bit like a really young Marianne Faithful (above), she suddenly starts singing "As Tears Go By" - not lip syncing, but singing right there, a capella, trilling her voice gently and feeling every word of the song, expressing some longing we have no idea about but the mood of wistful sadness overwhelms the film in a mod love tsunami before it's even begun. Like an ocean she pulls us in from the distance, washes over us and then recedes again; the film resumes its sand babbling even before she even finishes the song. Compared to this bit of subdued jaw-dropping emotionalism from a rising starlet of British rock royalty, the ensuing G. Marxist wordplay between Leaud and the bartender suddenly seems tired, yesterday's papers. There seems to be a new sincerity in town and it's cool to have feelings, or at any rate it's cool if you're up and coming Marianne Faithfull, the type of girl men fought dragons for, as Alan Delon once said.  as opposed to the mid-60s' new wave icon who may be too mature and well-read to recapture enough naivete to thrive in the Age of Aquarius. She's not about to pick up a stray flower and take off her shoes just because the other kids are doing it. So instead she just freezes from the knees down and looks at the floral arrangements like a penniless, starving lotus eater.

No wonder in the next scene Karina visits a health spa beauty parlor, where-- fittingly--any possibility for tranquility amidst the clients is destroyed by shrill announcements blaring over a crackly PA system. When Karina tells the resident doctor/agent interrogating her to stop "dicking around," you feel through her weary rage that she's indirectly talking to Godard, wishing he'd just write a script and stick to it so she could go home on time and put her feet up. She must have been full sick of his 'dicking around' by then, of waiting around on a hot set for his little whims, film after film. It shows. Only when she gets to be mean does she light up with the synthesis of truth and illusion.

And yet, thanks at least in some small part to her and her (soon-divorced) husband, the counterculture was beginning to catch fire in 1966. She has the burns and battle scars from getting the blaze going, part of the first wave. Faithfull by contrast looks like she was recently conjured out of a magic cloud of smoke, or pulled out of a junior high school gym class before she bruised her complexion in dodgeball. Godard and Karina were already burning out on decadence and freedom. Even if that's not true, it shows. This isn't complaint, just observation, an observation Godard clearly anticipates, tying this joint weariness into the film itself, the way for example, Tippi Hedren's bitchiness about working with an obsessive like Hitchcock may have led to the audience-alienating (but great!) outbursts of castrating rage in MARNIE.

What saves MADE from being just a taciturn misfire, Pierrot's hangover, is the way Godard accommodates his ingenue's hostility by linking it to the shocking effect of watching people get casually and suddenly shot--or seduced--without all the usual booming orchestral music that gives each romance or death such magnified resonance in Hollywood movies. MADE teaches us that, in real life, people don't have to brandish their gun and make speeches before firing- it can be so random and sudden that you never know what hit you until you wonder why you're suddenly feeling warm liquid run down your pants when it's not raining, then feel the bee sting, then fade to black. During a philosophical discussion with a suspect, for example, she asks, "Would you prefer a long slow old age death or a short exciting death in the moment?" and when he answers the latter, she shoots him on the spot. No fanfare, no warning. Crack! I think I cheered and stood up on my futon in that moment. God bless the USA.

In addition to the violence, there's some strange cultural intolerance: When Paula meets a guy who does an impersonation of a typical American--a lobotomized hick Jerry Lewis--Karina ups the ante by making slanty eyes to indicate it's "all Chinese to her." In addition to that kind of thing, the usual disruptions appear: random silences, the roar of passing planes or honking cars, and many stabs of Ludwig Van's 5th blaring in and out.. All this industrial strength ambience makes full grasp of the plot impossible. Oblique interview sequences are needed to correct the imbalance, as well as peculiar conversations overhead in front of comic book splashes, movie stills, streets with names like Preminger and Ben Hecht, and of course a pinball machine, though every bell and ping seems to hurt Karina's hangover. Ugh. Mine too. Enough with the pinball, Jean! 

More than most of the films that would follow in Godard's cannon, MADE actually struggles to maintain just enough plot to flirt with your attention span, luring you close enough to the amniotic wall between alienation and narrative immersion that you feel like your whole movie-going life is flashing before your eyes, as in the slim gap between watching a film and the act of reading its back cover synopsis. Godard's idea of a mystery film is to have a character read Dashiell Hammett aloud in front of a gas station while someone yells 'bang' every few seconds. Luckily, for MADE, though the characters do read aloud a bit, they at least still shoot each other. Bang! Bang! 

You may think I'm being callous applauding such violence, but as both Godard and I grew up on Monogram gangsters and Hollwood noirs, all castrated by our production code that insisted femme fatales must never go unpunished, even for just sleeping out of wedlock. Even after the code was lifted, Hollywood still insisted on this just out of habit up until the early 90s. Godard is way ahead of that. Our Made in USA antiheroine is a lethal combination of unpunished homicidal femme fatale, Dietrich-esque double agent and Chandleresque gumshoe, Her blase attitude towards being arrested and/or murdering people in cold blood is charming and alienating at the same time. Dario Argento could have diced her into three separate characters, but Godard is too political to divide a fractured psyche for the purpose of mere suspense. Here even the climactic showdowns are filtered through rhetoric and suffused with ennui, as when Paula--almost apologetic for the film's inertness--remarks:

We live in a part of the universe that's already old; nothing much happens, while elsewhere new galaxies are exploding into action.

A fatal mistake of many lesser filmmakers is the idea that mid-career crises (i.e. falling out of wunderkind status but still too wild to be an elder statesman) make good cinema. Anxious not to repeat yourself and unsure what to do next, they pile up the margins with past tricks and ideas from earlier films that never made the final script like an album of b-sides and unreleased tracks, wrapped up in a few alternate takes of greatest hits. Alas, to pull that off you need to keep the energy high, as in Scorsese's Casino, which moves too fast and vicious to let you realize it's got nothing whatever say (that wasn't said better in Goodfellas). Thankfully, Godard too has enough kinetic artistry to not let the acres of sadness between Karina and himself sink Made in USA's energy level. Instead he dials in his commie rage on Madison Avenue, which has dared, by then, to already recuperate its own critique. Godard wants Situationist cut-up techniques to be sole domain of the French Communist Party, but Madison Avenue wants to use Godard's methods so they can appear to enjoy his intellectual loathing. For example, if Godard says "Down with Kelloggs!" then Kelloggs' says "Godard is 'down with Kelloggs!'" to which Godard can only get redder in face and party, trying to end the game by saying "Death to advertising that tries to co-opt the tactics of Debord and detournement, to infinity squared!" 

To an intellectual post-modernist who loves co-opting quotations as much as Godard does, this is the ultimate defeat: your using of their own words used against you. You can't critique a power system that incorporates its own critique--Todd McGowan wrote about this in his Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment:

The insight into the functioning of power... has the effect of cementing power's hold over us rather than relaxing it. It does this by cutting off all lines of critique prior to their articulation. (54)

In the end, none of it matters as far the film's success, because we have Anna Karina. Tired though she looks and acts, she's still young and gorgeous and thanks to Criterion preserved for all time in vibrant, colorful dresses against the same color scheme of Pierrot Le Fou, which is probably the movie to see first if you're new to the game.

After Made in the USA and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (shot at the same time, with Godard originally wanting to show them in alternating reels), Godard would begin his descent into first into nihilistic ranting (Weekend) and then agitprop trust fund Marxism (La Chinoise, Tout Va Bien). Still witty, but sullen and sanctimonious as well, enraged that his rage hasn't made a discernible difference. When you get mad at contemporary culture for ignoring you when you shout, then you are a gardener yelling at a reticent flower bud All the sloganeering and tantrums in the world will not waken its bloom, oh foolish gardener. Only love, compromise, compost, water, and sun. And most of all, stop caring. A good teacher knows when to dial themselves back. If you get mad it mean the system has won. Go to the mountaintop and meditate. The flower blooms.

Luckily, old Godard got his Baudrillard-esque groove back as a mid-life crisis 80s reward for doing more or less just that. He found an untaped vein of poetry deep under absurdity's skin and he's been popping it ever since. And even now, 40 years later, Anna Karina and Marianne Faithfull are both paragons of old lady cool, still appearing regularly on TV and in movies, acting and singing with their beautifully smoke-ravaged voices, brown teeth and gaunt faces glowing like tombstones against an obsidian night. In an era when our own president is harassed by the media for occasionally having a cigarette, these two ladies are reminders that you can all just take a fucking walk / and I guess that I just don't know / and I guess that you've come a long way... baby. 

Virginia Slims - made in... you know where. 

Shoot it!